Swimming with closed eyes

[POLIDORI]

I usually spent my summers swimming in the sea as much as I can.
However, this year I am experiencing the experience (ha, ha) of being a father for the first time. Te baby girl is now 7 months old and that does not leave much time for things I used to do.

I manage to play sports and that include two or three times of swimming during the week, but I has to be in the pool that was build within the premises where I live. The pool almost has perfect measures, but it is a free swimming pool with neighbours using it all the time. However, come September, you can enjoy the emptiness of the pool for almost the whole morning and I can swim diagonals instead of the length of the pool, which makes up for a real entire lapse in a 25 m. pool.

One thing I began to do many years ago was to swim the first two or four pools with no googles. It offers me a more relaxed way of feeling the water and I have to put a bigger effort in thinking which the position of my body and a body parts can be.

This year I started doing more lapses without googles. Now I usually complete 24 of them before I start wearing them.

Swimming without seeing (except for short glampses to avoid collisionig with a wall or a person) offers me a much greater sense of feeling the water, focusing on going through it. As I cannot see my arms moving forward, I unconsciently do not aply so much force in them, so I relax much more. The feeling is so extreme in me that I am considering swimming longer without googles. The first few turns with them are mortifying for me.

I usually begin by swimming 12 lapses breathing to the left. Then 12 to the right. All w/out googles. Then I swim some with googles. Then I change to chest stroke for 12 lapses, which leaves me ready for a really good and hard trainning session of crawl, as I need to begin swimming at a very slow tempo to find my energy and rythm once I am 10-15-20 minutes into the water. So starting to swim with no googles helps me a lot to slow my pace at the beginning, which allows me to lengthen my sessions and complete more lapses. My main problem with swimming, I believe, is that I tend to go faster then I should, so sometimes I end up with no breath after 15 minutes. That forces me to recover between series (often changing styles or my breathing side) for a longer time than I would love to.

I would like to write a post about this, but in the meantime I need to think longer about what I feel. Also I would love to hear from experiences in other swimmers.

Thank you and greetings to you all.